Available surveys

The available surveys have been chosen as being particularly useful for
evaluating online learning environments that use a constructivist pedagogy.
They are useful to identify certain trends that may be happening among
your participants.
(To see a paper where these are used in a detailed analysis, see:
http://dougiamas.com/writing/herdsa2002)

COLLES - Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey

The COLLES comprises an economical 24 statements grouped into six scales,
each of which helps us address a key question about the quality of the on-line
learning environment:

How well do tutors enable students to participate in on-line learning?

Peer Support

Is sensitive and encouraging support provided on-line by fellow students?

Interpretation

Do students and tutors make good sense of each other's on-line communications?

Underpinning the dynamic view of learning is a new theory of knowing: social
constructivism, which portrays the learner as an active conceptualiser within
a socially interactive learning environment. Social constructivism is an epistemology,
or way of knowing, in which learners collaborate reflectively to co-construct
new understandings, especially in the context of mutual inquiry grounded in
their personal experience.

Central to this collaboration is the development of students' communicative
competence, that is, the ability to engage in open and critical discourse
with both the teacher and peers. This discourse is characterised by an empathic
orientation to constructing reciprocal understanding, and a critical attitude
towards examining underlying assumptions.

The COLLES has been designed to enable you
to monitor the extent to which you are able to exploit the interactive capacity
of the World Wide Web for engaging students in dynamic learning practices.

ATTLS - Attitudes to Thinking and Learning Survey

The theory of 'ways of knowing', originally from the field of gender research (Belenky et al., 1986) provides us with a survey tool to examine the quality of discourse within a collaborative environment.

The Attitudes Towards Thinking and Learning Survey (ATTLS) is an instrument developed by Galotti et al. (1999) to measure the extent to which a person is a 'connected knower' (CK) or a 'separate knower' (SK).

People with higher CK scores tend to find learning more enjoyable, and are often more cooperative, congenial and more willing to build on the ideas of others, while those with higher SK scores tend to take a more critical and argumentative stance to learning.

Studies have shown that these two learning styles are independent of each other (Galotti et al., 1999; Galotti et al., 2001). Additionally, they are only a reflection of learning attitudes, not learning capacities or intellectual power.